Category: Net: Blogging

Cool, it appears the a certain ODP editor has decided to release the Movable Type designed template he uses on his blog as open source to download and use on your own site.

I must admit, for the last few days I’ve been tempted to “borrow” his site design (as it’s quite nice looking) but at least I can do it legally now 😉 I have already purchase some other web site templates to use on various websites, but unlike Mr.T, I’m not a designer. I can manipulate the design, but I just can’t get it to “feel right” to me – it doesn’t really help with Photoshop making “fixed layout” HTML instead of the dynamic flexible type. There’s still a chance they you may find that my blog could start looking like Neil’s 😀

Some of you may have noticed that my Blocking Free Email Domains post appeared, then reappeared as “Post deleted” and then reappeared properly – and I think an explanation is in order.

Basically, that post lists over 12,000 domain names that provide free email addresses (i.e. like Hotmail and Yahoo) but the content management system I use for my blog – MovableType – doesn’t accept posts over a certain size (no, I’m not sure what the maximum post size is: all I know is the domain name list got truncated mid-way through the “d’s”).

So how did I work around it? Basically, I uploaded the body of the post (which includes the list of domain names) into a “storage/holding/cache” area of the blog’s webspace (which also holds things like cached adverts – the mini “guess that movie” sidebar generation system etc etc) and then just used a PHP include_once command to make the list appear “inline” of the post.

However, if you do do this yourself, there is something you should be aware of. It’ll break your site’s search functionality (including the auto-highlight functionality provided by MT- Ref Search) – not a major biggie, but something you should be aware of.

Well two days later, but still – Welcome back to Richy’s Random Ramblings!

Yep, I’m going to try and make at least one entry every single day of the following month to this blog: at one point, I was blogging at around 5 posts a day – but lately I’ve been “running on dry” and not had much to ramble about: but hopefully things should go a bit more smoothly this month.

What have I been doing with my time the last few days? Mainly playing Blogshares where I am currently the 110th richest player (I made a hefty amount when Bookmoz floated: the shares instantly shot up to somewhere around $27.55 each!) currently with a projected worth of $128,568 ! Wow: I wish that was real money!

I’ve currently brought all available shares in a wide range of blogs: such as the CurryBet one about the BBC Websearch system, OneFineJay (which I’ve been reading for a while but not extensively enough to put on my blogroll yet), the Leicestershire based blogs (Blatherblog, SensitiveLight and in Bookmoz’s rival site Bibliblog (which is run by Kymberlie who is number 200 in the charts at the moment). Only bad choices I think I’ve made recently are ones like Exordium where I’m currently making a loss of over $2k!

Anyway: normal service is being resumed – I’m going to preload the blog database with a few “standby” posts so if I am short of content on anyday, at least I’ll be able to get _something_ live within 4 clicks or so.

Go on, have a look at the “Blogshares Top 100 Blogs” and see who appears in position 92.

Yep, it’s Richy’s Random Ramblings showing that all 10,000 shares (I’ve done a “share split” to double the number of available shares) have been sold in my blog and that each share is currently worth $3.92. Doesn’t sound a lot, but it means my lowly little blog is worth a whopping $11,738.24 and beats other well known blogs such as “Davezilla” and “Scriptygoddess”.

Now, if my shares in blogs I don’t read such as Deirdre on the WEB, MyDimension # unDefining Reality and JNalpak.com were to make sudden rises as well (as I’ve got 1000 shares in each of them worth just $233.33), then I’ll be able to sell them and hopefully buy some of my own stock back. But since each outgoing link from my blog is currently worth a massive $257.35, then hopefully me just mentioning them here will cause them to increase in value…

However, I’ve got a very strong feeling that my share price is going to slump by around $9,000 shortly for a short period of time – so I would advise people reading this to sell their stock in my blog now!

I’ve you’ve got no idea what I’m gabbering on about, go check out Blogshares, it’s still in beta (launches on the 1st of May), but it’s a whole lot of fun (for free!) and like me you could increase your initial $500 of virtual money up to $20,246 within a week. Now, if only I had the real life money to play the real life stock exchange….